Free The Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg Page A

was a girl. I suspected that, this man was gay, I could see that. He said the woman was his best friend and they’d decided to have a baby together, that she was close to the end of the pregnancy now and very testy, in fact she’d just thrown him out of her apartment and he’d had no way home, they’d been out in her car. He said he thought pregnant women were supposed to be easy to get along with, all dreamy and soft .
    I said, Well .
    He said she’d been cleaning like a crazy person and I said yes, the time is close, then, that was exactly what I’d done when I was close. Martin came home and I had been washing walls which I had never done in my life. He’d taken the bucket from me, saying, “Nan, Nan.” It was kind of sweet. That night, at four in the morning, the contractions started. I’d awakened Martin and he’d said, “Well, you’d better try to rest a little more, you’ll need your strength,” and then he promptly went back to sleep. Snored! But I got up and went into Ruthie’s room, which was all ready for her. I stacked and restacked her tiny T-shirts, wound her mobile, thought, soon I will know if you’re a boy or a girl .
    I told this young man, Ethan, his name was, I said, you know, a woman who is very pregnant needs a lot of very special attention. He said, well what could he do, he was there, wasn’t he?, he came to see her every day, he tried to do things for her, but she was just so damn cranky. And then he sighed and looked out the window and said he thought what she really wanted was for him to love her … that way. And he couldn’t. I said that must be very hard. He said I didn’t know the half of it. I said maybe he shouldn’t go home, maybe he should go back to her apartment. He said yes he knew that, in fact he was just going to ask me to let him out and he was going to hitch back there, take her out to dinner, she liked the bacon burgers at the Embers, lately, although he himself thought it was not the best thing for the baby. I said I’d take him back to her house. He said really? I said sure. He asked me to stop at a florist’s and he came out with two bouquets. He’d gotten one for me. Freesia. I said, Oh, but I’m on the road, they’ll just die. So he went back in the store and bought a vase and he put the flowers in there and anchored it with a ribbon to the door handle. I thought, what a nice thing. And I was so happy I’d picked him up .
    I used to always have interesting things happen when I picked up hitchhikers—not always pleasant, but always interesting. Once, a man had such terrible BO I had to leave the car windows open overnight. But other times I got to see the flash of a life like a peek at someone’s true hand of cards, and I liked that .
    On my twentieth birthday, I was out driving with a girlfriend and we picked up a man I have thought about a million times since. He sat in the back with his arm draped across the seat as though his invisible companion were along for the ride, too. My girlfriend and I were kidding around a little bit and he was laughing at everything we said and soon we were all laughing, it was the kind of thing where the laughter feeds on itself, where the sound of someone else’s snorting and wheezing keeps you going until you don’t even know why you started laughing in the first place—and you don’t care. It’s so good for you, that kind of hard laughter, so cleansing—you feel like your liver’s been held up and hosed down, your heart relieved of a million grimy weights. We were driving down Lake Street, I remember, with the windows open and our elbows hanging out to an early spring day. The sun was high in the sky, “I Can See Clearly Now” was on the radio and I thought, nothing needs to be hard. I thought, I can suggest anything, and these two will say, “Sure!”
    Before I had a car, I hitchhiked a lot, too. I had my fair share of nasty men pick me up; one said he “laid out stiffs” for a living, and showed me his